Facebook urged to scrap Instagram for children plans
bbc.com
bbc.com
"But the company's real goal is to expand its lucrative and highly profitable Instagram franchise to an even younger demographic, introducing children to a powerful commercialised social media environment that poses serious threats to their privacy, health and wellbeing."
Of course, we're hearing the usual platitudes about how they'll make it safe and how it's a good thing and so on. Why the heck should we trust a single word that comes from Facebook?
Thus the real question is "do I want Facebook to regulate children access to Instagram, their interaction with other children and adult users, and moderate third party content and advertising targeted to children?", which IMHO is a must.
You can make Instagram's discovery algorithm show very extreme child-unsafe content with just few searches and likes; the influencers there (not necessarily targeting children) can have serious impact on a child's mind. And of course, it's a unrestricted private chat, with all the predators such services come with. Also consider cases that might require special treatment like bullying, grooming...
[1] - around 5 years ago Tinder produced an error message if the birthdate was under 18 - which led to all the 13-17 girls using fake birthdates, and mixed them with the general adult public, in large numbers (roughly every fifth profile I saw back then was underage).
Purely anecdotal but speaking as a dad myself I don't know any kids using Facebook or Instagram. By kids I'm meaning pre-teens here so maybe our definitions differ.
Children should be kept off all these sorts of platforms imho. It's entirely within a parent's control. I therefore don't like FB trying to lure more people into their world with a product like this.
Sure they can make it safer for children but I think this misses the core point. This is not suitable for them however its designed.
I'd rather have Facebook recognize this issue, there will always be vast numbers of underage users on Instagram and simply setting age limit is simply ignorance of the real world complexities of teenage behavior while chasing perfection. How do you hold Facebook accountable to protect children from predators if children are said to be banned? The perfect world of kids not using Instagram won't happen, not even a significant reduction is going to happen, regardless of fines or prison time for Facebook executives - the kids really want to have social network profiles, the only working option would be to liquidate the company - and the kids would simply move to TikTok.